We’re thrilled to announce the new program and new aims of BASEMENT ROMA, the non-pro- fit and self-sustained independent exhibition space run by CURA. and located in the basement of the magazine’s editorial office in the heart of Prati’s district in Rome.

“Highly responsive to the movement of information” – Dorothy Howard says, in the exhibition text – “Ed Fornieles’ work operates within the logic of immersive simulations, enacting change through constructed environments and events. His ambitious, large-scale projects often involve cultural, social, and infrastructural production, making interventions that reconfigure the viewer’s position and sense of self.

In Truth Table the gallery is converted into the provider of an experience: a new VR product that allows the viewer to occupy a changing host of bodies as they engage in a chain of sexual interactions. Within the cycle, the configuration of bodies constantly shifts, as does the viewer’s perspective. Variables are randomized, moving from familiar to unfamiliar, possibly aligning with a viewer’s own tastes and preferences, until inevitably drifting into the unknown and alien. In this experience, the user’s default assumptions of sexual taste are obfuscated and abstracted, resulting in a leveling out, in which each type and form is given equal emphasis.

Mechanically speaking, the installation is generated by a randomizing algorithm, distinct from the sorts of algorithms that shepherd users’ tastes in online social media platforms and content farms. Typically, these algorithms inspire an experience that has come to be known as the filter bubble: prior user choices are rendered into data, which are then analyzed and used to predict what sort of content the user might enjoy being offered. The filter bubble is thus a space in which an individual’s views and aesthetic choices are compounded: their options are limited to those objects and opinions which already align with their taste. In this way, forms are reinforced and pushed to extremes as they avoid the friction of a counter point of view or disrupting image. The use of randomization in Truth Table pushes against this re-enforcing bubble; instead, equally distributed variables work to counteract expectations and predilections – the effect of which might at times feel jarring, as the rules that make up our image world are stripped back to reveal a mathematical model in its place.

In this sense, unlike simulations which aim at advancing psychological or scientific models, Fornieles’ installation instead offers users an experience more similar to a dream state, where scenarios play out as a disjointed version of their real world correlates, moving by their own momentum, while nonetheless implicating the viewer at each turn. Dormant phantoms lurk in the synapses, waiting to make themselves known.
Undergirding all of Ed Fornieles’ work is an uncanny ability to tap into the deep structure of the human unconscious. The simulation on offer in Truth Table advances Fornieles’ trajectory, negotiating the psychosomatic forms of relationality, implied by algorithmic content models, immersive virtual realities, and technologies of sexuality.”

On the occasion of the opening BASEMENT ROMA also launches the new website, designed by Studio Lhooq, Philadelphia and a brand new bookshop, designed by the London-based artist and architect Alessandro Bava, featuring a selection of artists’ books, editions and international independent publishers.

Imagine a painting of the sea. A full moon partially hidden by thin clouds. The inky sky reflected in the expansive ocean. The image is completed on both sides by a rocky crevice that frames the image leading the eye from foreground to background. This crepuscular scene — a symbol of a certain type of escape — is an idea of the rural reduced to a signal. It is landscape as road sign, to be read quickly and recognised at distance. This is a common strategy within the work of Danish artist Ditte Gantriis. Think of a candlestick. What does a whicker basket look like? Now imagine them scaled up. What would these objects look like in a cartoon? The archetypal becomes astronomical and absurd.

Think about the film Honey I Shrunk the Kids and the shrunken protagonists negotiating an unfamiliar landscape of over-sized domestic appliances. The home suddenly becoming weaponised. What happens when the familiar and at hand are suddenly estranged? Gantriis’ work similarly offers an adjusted sense of the everyday, forcing us to look afresh. Looking at the artist’s work is like being prescribed glasses for the first time with the world brought into sharper focus. Groceries lie on glass table tops. Aubergines, courgettes, fennel and salami made with coloured and blown glass, made in collaboration with a master glass maker. While their forms signal sustenance, their ever-ripe surfaces remain inedible. The artist defers the satisfaction of consumption, instead presenting a type of mirage — in sight but perpetually out of reach. This is food to be chewed in the mind rather than the mouth.

Running through Gantriis’ work is an investment in the idea of cliches and archetypes. How can one courgette stand in for all the others? The artist originally studied printmaking, and one can see these objects as a type of cast. Similarly to a screen print, a vegetable is both singular and repeatable and, with only minor variations, you know what a potato is going to taste like. The term cliche dates back to the printmaking studios of the 19th century where it was used to denote a printer’s stereotype block (the metal typeface used to print from). A cliche is repetition with only incremental change. If we think about Gantriis’ landscape painting we can say that it aggregates complex and nebulous ideas of the rural and flattens them. Imagine every picture of the sea ever taken and now superimpose them over the top of each other — the hazy lines start to consolidate, forming a composite. This image may start to look a bit like Gantriis’ painting. Stereotypes, archetypes, cliches and caricatures — they each articulate an attempt to simplify — it is the image, rather than an image. One can think of a cliche as a form of overplayed pop song, its obvious charms rendered numb through over play. Gantriis’ adjusts the frequency, foregrounding the melody over the din of the static, and reminding us of the song’s original potency.

Similarly, we can see the homogenising effect of mass production very clearly in the flat pack Modernism of IKEA. From Malmo to Newcastle, Berlin and Mumbai, one piece of furniture starts to look much like any another. Yet Gantriis’ work resists the thematics of flat-pack personalisation, her work is too lovingly crafted. Often working with specialised fabricators, her practice elides various aesthetic registers. The rugged authenticity of artisanal processes often meet gaudy decorative flourishes. Elegance abuts the garish. Her work, like the world around us, is formed of fictions and hybrids. I’m reminded of how Chow Mein is an American approximation of Chinese food, a result of migration and translation between geographies and communities. I think about super market apples that are genetically modified and waxed to make them shinier and more desirable. At a point where even our food is designed, the authentic and synthetic are increasingly conjoined.

Gantriis focuses on how visual lexicons are upended and repurposed. There is a slipperiness to our visual world that the artist embraces. One can think of the mock tudor facades of millionaire footballers and the faux-Classical facia of Regency architecture (most of the centre of London is designed like this). In both instances, a historical style is commandeered to validate new money. It’s the same story on the East Coast of America. Washington is architectural karaoke, aping Roman and Greek motifs to fictionalise a historical legitimacy. All design has genealogies and, as such, is often instrumentalized towards social and political agendas. It can be camouflage and signal, be a tool of oppression as much as emancipation. The surface of objects and images are containers for messages and meaning, and to read them means developing a visual literacy in the broadest terms. Gantriis’ work reminds us that making is a form of rereading, sentizising us to the signs around us.

Issues of taste are more broadly about questions of access. Think about the pejorative terms for falsified luxury and privileges that are perceived to be unearned. Ostentation, adornment, extravagance and bling — new money tends to flaunt its wealth, while older money maintains a dignified modesty. It’s a common narrative and accusations of bad taste are often gendered, class bound and racial. People that want power, or feel underrepresented, tend to speak the loudest because silence is often a privilege of access. Of course, if you don’t agree with a prescribed narrative you can reject it — you can form your own language. The decorative and domestic are of interest precisely because of their historical marginalisation. Lets remember that beauty is a contested value and not the privilege of a few. Strategies of visual seduction, enjoyment (and humour), so often labelled as kitsch within Modernity, are common strategies within so much contemporary practice. Gantriis even names her new exhibition Sexual Feeling, explicating this desire for a certain sensuality. Taken collectively, the exhibition asks the question, why should pleasure be denied?

The Gallery Apart is pleased to announce Shadow rift, Sinae Yoo’s first exhibition at the gallery, curated by Domenico de Chirico.
Vivid free interpretation of situations, objects, figures and a complex sign language in pop culture and extended cultural exchanges as they move through historical motifs and compositions, posing notions of an expressive self, this is the general starting point for the artistic work of Korean artist Sinae Yoo (1985). Currently living in Switzerland, for her first solo exhibition in Italy at The Gallery Apart in Rome, she has produced a large new work series, including: a video accompanied by the soundtrack, installations, drawings and ceramics.
In ‘Shadow rift’, Sinae Yoo seeks to deconstruct the privileged sense of the Western theoria: the sight. Seeing does not mean exclusively seeing, as each gaze needs a concealment. This typically Deriddan practice implies that the reflection upon the sight, upon the vision, upon the gaze and the eye, intertwines inextricably with the touch: «If two gazes look into each other's eyes, can we say that in that right moment they are touching each other?».
Vision and touch, distance and proximity interlace like a chiasm and the con-tact of the eyes is given as a condition, so that the look and the encounter with the other occur contemporaneously. The essence of this discourse is unquestionably ethical: Sinae Yoo investigates the mode of being and the ability to deal with the other. Such ocular theory results, so to speak, in a technological impasse: the vision becomes tact and the sight becomes contact. Therefore, the relationship with the other deconstructs the movement between proximity and distance, their presumed duality and their nitid separation. In the extreme vicinity the eye cannot see anymore, points and touches like a finger and so ultimately, its function becomes digital, no longer optic but haptic (i.e., tactile object recognition). The aim is to highlight a new relationship, built and realized through the sight and by opening the eyes to the world. To quote the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, « we have to touch without touching, that is to know how to touch without touching, without touching too much ».
Within the exhibition, rich in synaesthesia, the reflection on the look becomes also a question of identity which takes concrete form integrating with the distances typical of the spectral, immaterial and pharmaceutical cyberspace: here it is possible to kiss from a distance.
‘Shadow rift’ welcomes the visitors with a doormat typical of South Korea, which is usually placed outside or inside the doorway of a house or a building in order to allow people to clean the sole of footwear before entering a place. The invitation to perform a ritualistic gesture, a ceremonial custom, serves as the introduction to an exhibition that collects every aspect of a private world. Once inside, the visitor is overwhelmed by a protective atmosphere where a series of messages, symbols and objects universally recognizable are kept. To welcome the visitor there is a mobile shield, symbolically representing an immune subject, visual result of the achievement of a possible stage of digital cleaning and personal privacy. The prevailing blue colour of the installation is a sample of the distinctive blue pot of the Nivea creme. The well-known ‘snow-white’ crème, having special functions that allowed to keep the skin as white as alabaster, obtained a sudden success as it could also be stored for a long period of time. In the work of Sinae Yoo, the cosmetic product acquired a metaphorical relevance since it is acknowledged in unison as one of the oldest product of the German mass product, although it dates back to the Nazi regime, when it was defined as the ‘Jewish crème’ because the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Beiersdorf, where the lotion was produced, was Jewish. For some evident historical references, it is possible to start an antithetical reflection between antigen and antibody, internal and external, friends and foes, I and the other, pure and impure, negativity and positivity. A collection of sushi-boxes, featuring ‘embryonic’ creatures made of ceramic , clearly unravels the issue of packaged food, through the use of perfect and eye-catching incubators, in order to reassure the consumers: it is a formal statement against the question of the aesthetic similarity of commercial mass products. On the other hand, the drawings aim at investigating the relationship, generally problematic, between the social and biological sphere. A further installation consists of a series of columns containing surveillance cameras, covered with a semi-transparent fabric, aimed at highlighting the impossibility of clarity in interpersonal relationships. Indeed, according to a totally Freudian vision, human existence is not limpid even to itself and such lacuna has an effect also on the relationship with the other. On the lower floor of the gallery, decorated with Nivea crème tins, there is the video ‘The Dead by Many Firsts’ (2016), accompanied by a soundtrack purposely composed for the video, where a blind girl swims in bluescreen-like water: it is the ghost of the ghost who lives in a status of deification of his own mental hygiene and who tries narcissistically to boost, with regard to healthiness, the image that the others can have of himself, through the use of an adaptable mimic and of protective models of the screen lock. Moreover, the video seeks to explore the concept of cyber-hygiene, in the 21st century, along with its multiple meanings not of immediate understanding. In this respect, indeed, quoting the British journalist Ben Hammersley: «The most important life skill we'll be teaching our children over the coming decades will be cyber-hygiene. Fighting infections in the 21st century is less about washing your hands and more about not clicking on untrusted email attachments. Those of us who don't understand this will be shunned as digitally unclean». During the opening, the exhibition will feature a live act by the young German performer and choreographer Nils Amadeus Lange. He will make a one to one performance exploring different forms of intimacy & hygiene with Nivea cream based on Sinae Yoo's video ‘The Dead by Many Firsts’ (2016).
www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jun/16/future-of-behaviour-concepts-for-21st-centuryINFORMATION
EXHIBITION: Sinae Yoo – Shadow rift
CURATED: Domenico De Chirico
VENUE: The Gallery Apart – Via Francesco Negri, 43, Rome, Italy
VERNISSAGE: 13/12/2016
EXHIBITION DURATION: 13/12/2016 – 11/02/2017
OPENING HOURS: Tuesday to Saturday, 3.00 pm – 7.00 pm and by appointment
INFO.: The Gallery Apart – tel/fax 0668809863 – info@thegalleryapart.it – www.thegalleryapart.it

Sinae Yoo (b. 1985, Seoul) recently had a solo exhibition at Kunsthaus Langenthal (2016). Her video work Enemy (2016) was displayed at the Daojiao art festival in China. I Am Permanently Broken On Temporary Ideas (2015) was exhibited in the ‘Playtime’ exhibition in Los Angeles. The First Smell Of The Moon (2015) video was screened in O’New’Wall Gallery in Seoul. She also exhibited video works Tidymess (2014) in Kunsthalle Bern at the Cantonale Bern Jura exhibition as well as The Book of Strange New Wind (2014) at Kunsthaus Langenthal and Delivery Near Me (2014) at Centre Pasqu’Art Biel. Her practice bridges multiple disciplines including video, sculpture, and new media. She earned an MA in Contemporary Arts Practice from Bern University of the Arts and a BA in Fine Arts from Sejong University Seoul. Yoo currently resides in both Switzerland and Korea.

Nils Amadeus Lange (1989 Köln) works as a performer and choreographer in Zurich. After completing his drama studies at Hochschule der Künste Bern, he began withdrawing from shifting his focus to abstract forms of expression, dance and performance history during his master's program „Scenic Arts Practice“ (also at Hochschule der Künste Bern). He uses his body as a weapon, with which he pierces through the audience's heads, in order to subsequently dissect memories of conventions, role models and gender stereotypes from their brains. For the piece „under the influence“, he received the Publikumspreis des Performance Award Schweiz 2015 along with Janet Haufler. Recent years have seen the emergence of not only his own work, but also various collaborations. Among other works, the online series and stage„body and freedom“ was developed in collaboration with Florentina Holzinger, Vincent Riebeek, Annina Machaz and Manuel Scheiwiller, which premiered at Tanzhaus Zürich. (Further performances: ImPuls Tanz Wien, Liste Basel, Haus der Berliner Festspiele). At the Lithuanian pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2015, he was part of the young boy dancing group, a company with open authorship.

The incessant efforts that are required by the Great Work seem destined to project the half-wakened conscience into a state of transnational reawakening, and thus the ascension of material to the Igneous Light which constitutes its highest limit. [Carl G. Jung]

MLF | Marie-Laure Fleisch exhibits for the first time in Rome a solo show of the Greek artist Panos Tsagaris, represented by Kalfayan Galleries, Athens – Thessaloniki, entitled Let The Sun Protest. On show, a series of large canvases and recent works on paper.
Fascinated and influenced by spirituality, mystical tradition, the Occult, and Alchemy, Panos Tsagaris explores current themes and takes his inspiration from contemporary society. He veils his research in sacred dimension, demonstrating the interconnection between the values and principles of different religions in his attempt to bring the spectator closer to a Cathartic state through Art. His works are the results of a series of passages suggesting a process of continual transformation from a lower to a higher state, towards the ideal purification.
Tsagaris has created his latest series of works, Untitled, starting from installations which he assembled in his studio using mirrors of different sizes and shapes. A powerfully symbolic object with multiple significances, in mythology the mirror traditionally symbolises the transition from a divine to a material state. The reflection disassembles the authenticity and uniqueness of the being, transposing it into a deceptive corporeity (as in the case of Narcissus). On the other hand and in a positive sense, in Neo-Platonic thought and Christian mysticism, the same human soul, pushed by its natural urge to contemplate the Divine, becomes the mirror in which innate Beauty is reflected.
Tsagaris photographs the precursors of his compositions using an I-Phone, a vain mirror of modernity and of our ego; he prints in black and white, photographing the same images over and over, always adding new mirrors until they lose their capacity to reflect. At this point, the photographs are silk-screen printed by hand on canvas and by superimposing the images, new forms and figures are created. In the final phase, the canvases are painted with acrylic paints, and some selected areas are highlighted with gold leaf.
We witness a twofold transformation: firstly conceptual, by the elimination of the reflective properties of the mirrors the human conscience metaphorically abandons the material and earthly state to rise to a higher level to reach a divine essence. The three-dimensional installation is converted into photography, then screen prints, then finally painting.
Some of his works are accompanied by writings on spiritualism, such as the diptych Transmutation, which brings together the image of a text on the ascendance and evolution of the soul through the process of the “tomb of transformation”, the grave into which the soul descends to find salvation, and then sumblimates towards a new and ever superior condition.
With its powerful symbolism, the gold leaf becomes the protagonist of the three works of the series Golden Newspaper, started some years ago by the artist in response to the Greek financial crisis. Panos collected international newspapers, mainly copies of the New York Times as he lived in the USA in that period. He made large scale reproductions of the front pages, leaving only the name of the newspaper and an image representing the country’s crisis, and covered all the columns of text with gold leaf. In the last two years, the series was expanded to focus on more widespread socio-political problems. In the exhibited works, the artist concentrates on images regarding the European-wide phenomenon of migration, and which is affecting in particular the countries of the Mediterranean region. Panos Tsagaris works with a method of subtraction to create a visually powerful effect by transforming his work into a sort of religious icon. Gold – the epitome of purity – represents a state of not material well-being, but that derived from the aim of the work: the reawakening of individual and collective conscience, accompanied by a growing inner spirituality which allows us to comprehend with greater consciousness the reality that surrounds us.

With the Für immer (Forever) project, Philip Topolovac leads us on a path of disaster and reconstruction, of loss and recovery. The exhibition opens with a burning building: a small model of the “Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana” designed by Guerrini, Lapadula and Romano (1936-1943), an iconic monument of Mussolini’s EUR district and later, after the war, an epitome of the failed aspirations of greatness of the fascist regime. The building burns, shrouded in smoke, reminding us not only of the collapse of the dictatorship but also of the crisis of Modernism’s ideological certainties. Except that this is not a building, nor a real architectural scale model, but rather an iron brazier containing re but which is never consumed. The model of a monument blended with a household item, this curious imperial and fascist barbecue combines its dramatic quality with a certain sense of humour. The image of the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, icon of modern Rome and at the same time evocative of ancient Rome (through a formal analogy with the classical architecture that made it popularly known as the “Square Colosseum”) introduces a movement between past and present that characterises the entire exhibition. The sculpture stages the loss of an architectural object which in turn stands for the loss of a classical past that is now inaccessible.
The ruins are par excellence the testimonial objects of a loss. Evidence representing the destruction of the past as well as the omen of future disasters - aided by the sense of tragedy created today by environmental disasters, existing or impending wars and economic crises -, the ruins represent the short-circuit between past and present which, as Benjamin and Agamben teach us, belongs precisely to modernity. A heap of ruins greets visitors in the first room of the gallery: they are fragments of two plaster casts, the first from an anonymous Baroque statue of a saint or angel, the second from the replica of an obsolete satellite, one of the sculptures that Topolovac - fascinated by the fate of these objects which, when of no longer use, continue to oat in the atmosphere like “space junk” - dedicated to the theme (this is the bronze Envisat, 2014-2015). Two celestial objects, one ancient, one modern, coexisting on the gallery floor like debris that the spectator is compelled to trample on. The respective original versions - the painted wooden saint and the satellite sculpture - can be seen in the next room, on display in a glass case along with other objects. Many of these (a piece of molten glass, an old helmet, other smaller fragments) are the result of the explorations that Philip Topolovac made in the bombarded sites while residing in Berlin, a city populated by ruins not only from the years of Nazism but also from the Cold War. Similar to archaeological pieces, they are not meant as archival artefacts, instruments of a historical record of the past, rather as a key of access to a past reality to emotionally live again. The emotion however, is always offset by a tinge of humour, here discreetly demonstrated by the broken nose of a plaster head, placed in the display case next to a book on Roman portraiture. The nose derives from a plaster self-portrait made in the style of imperial statues; a work that Topolovac abandoned after realising that another artist had simultaneously had the same idea, and which he has ironically recovered indirectly. The synecdoche represented by the plaster nose brings into play the author, who himself is part of the shift between ancient and modern, absence and presence, disappearance and restitution which stands at the core of the project.
Another figure of loss and recovery is the cast, relic of a presence that has been taken away but whose traces remain. Topolovac utilises the moulding technique in a series of resin reliefs that reproduce the conformation of areas of land, presented as modular elements placed within a metal grid. The sculpture, whose measure is the size of the Roman foot (29.63 cm), again suggests the identification of different time levels; the Modernist framework of the grid coincides with the checkerboard structure transmitted from the Greek polis to the Roman castrum. The surface of the relief, however organised and seemingly “mapped” by the grid, retains an indefinite and vaguely mysterious quality (which land is it? where does it come from? why is it here?), just as mysterious is the hole in one of the walls of the gallery, another recurring element in the work of Topolovac, usually created for letting his sculptures emerge from cracks and holes that seem to hint at a hidden and inexplicable dimension of architecture. The hole is enigmatic but also funny, a kind of burrow dug in a domestic setting, where we don’t know what may be lurking.
Topolovac presents us with the promise of pathos and nostalgia so frequently associated in contemporary art to themes he deals with (the cast, the ruins, the relic, the catastrophe), only to withdraw immediately it with the shadow of a smile. In this sense, the video that closes the exhibition just as it had begun, is just as effective, with the image of a disaster that is not really so: a model of the Titanic laid on trestles appears for a few seconds, it explodes before our eyes and reappears, in a loop. A continuous cycle of destruction and reconstruction that neither confirms or denies the assurance of stability and durability handed to us by the title of the project. Forever?

For his first solo exhibition at T293 gallery HEIM JUST, Herkenhoener further stresses the play between causality and authoriality that has always informed his research through the use of a surrealists’ technique known as ‘cut-up’. Popularised by T. S. Eliot and W. Burroughs, the cut-up is a literary technique in which a text is cut and then randomly rearranged in order to create a new text. In this case, the text is rearranged by a software onto which the artist has previously inserted several selected texts along with his own writings. Herkenhoener has invented the expression ‘processing text’ in order to explain his artistic research: a research that arises from a specific context without never been completely subjected to the touch of the artist. Such process leads to the creation of a random language that refuses any rational or semantic hierarchy, albeit opening the path to new horizons of meaning. Indeed, in all his paintings and murals, the artist explores how to create the appropriate visual context for these illogical words to be fully experienced in their emotional and spiritual potential.

The processual aspect of Herkenhoener’s practice goes beyond the selection of the content of the works (that are texts and words, as said), and becomes more evident in the way such content is shaped. Specifically, in his latest series of works, words and extracts of randomly created poems take geometric forms or invade the canvas as grid-like structures that are meant to emphasize the mental and emotional dynamics that generated them. Sometimes the artist prefers to even lose control over the creation of the background of his paintings, being this background the visual context onto which these decadent-like free verse poems unfold and make sense. Indeed, his is a play with chance that transcends the form, and informs the way the process unfolds.

In Herkenhoener’s artistic practice, the disintegration of meanings follows the dematerialisation of the work of art that occasionally takes the form of a painting, a film or a performance, or all of the above at once. At T293, along with never-seen before paintings and site-specific mural interventions, the artist presents new video works recording the artist himself working on his paintings, or simply portraying with a steady camera some non-identifiable public statues or places. Undeniably, these works highlight the processual nature of Herkenhoener’s practice. Moreover, they emphasize all the motifs nurturing his poetics that unfold in this show as a profound reflection on the human condition, and on the restless yet always apparent change that humanity as well as the world have to face.

All these dilemmas are poetically summarised in the title of the show, HEIM JUST, which translates from German the English expression ‘Just Home’. This is a sentence that refers to an arrival, but also to a transition. It is a moment in a route that has still not reached its end, and that links together distant semantics; it tells about the withdraw of a spirit who has faced the complexities of the world, but that has also found a way to make sense of them, and transcend them by stepping through the door of his own intimacy.

The Fondazione Memmo Arte Contemporanea is proud to present Conversation Piece | Part 3, the third exhibition in a series curated by Marcello Smarrelli, and intended to chart the presence of italian and foreign artists currently living in Rome or particularly attached to the city. The artists invited to this third exhibition are: Jonathan Baldock, Piero Golia, Magali Reus (Dutch fellow at the American Academy in Rome), Claudia Wieser (fellow at the Accademia Tedesca di Roma Casa Baldi).

The project was conceived with the aim of continually reviewing the contemporary art scene in Rome which is difficult to understand for the general public, but is a surprisingly active panorama dominated by the continuous activity of galleries, foundations, Academies and foreign cultural institutes where new generations of artists from all over the world, traditionally complete their education. Through these exhibitions and other activities, such us talk, workshops and performances, the Fondazione Memmo aims to support these institutions, which are considered vital in the maintenance and development of the contemporary visual arts and culture in Rome.

The project’s title is inspired by one of the most famous movies by Luchino Visconti: Gruppo di Famiglia in un interno (Conversation Piece, 1974). In turn the film’s title referred to a specific genre of Dutch painting - became popular in the XVII and XVIII centuries - showing scenes of genteel conversation and everyday domestic life. This exhibition is an opportunity to discuss on the work of different artists, who offer a great variation in research, poetry, and techniques, but it is also a moment of dialogue with Rome and its ancient and contemporary history.

As for the previous editions, also for “Conversation Piece | Part 3” artists have been asked to reflect on a specific suggestion, linked to the nature of objects and their specific use in the artistic practice. «Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us – noted Marcel Proust - is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anythings else, and by the immobility of our conception of them», so if we would approach things from other points of view, we should learn different and new answers that would otherwise remain unknown. This is one of the main themes of the most radical avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, such as Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, up to the end of the fifties to the New Dada, actually based on a new interest in the everyday object that the junk culture, revived through a process of détournement, leaving this interest as an inheritance to the movements born soon after: Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art.
It is about that principle of defamiliarization of an object proposed again by Jasper Johns in the early sixties with the statement: “Take an object / Do something to it / Do something else to it”, that gave birth to a phenomenon that will be the leitmotiv of an entire generation of artists and critics.

The use of items borrowed directly from the everyday life reopens an ever-present issue within the discussion on the contemporary, revitalized by philosopher Arthur Danto in 1964 when, visiting the exhibition where Andy Warhol was exhibiting for the first time the series of Brillo Boxes, concluded that arts have –by that time- reached the maximum point of self-consciousness, because the work of art was no longer distinguishable from a commercial product: any object can be a work of art, even if not every work is separable from its time and if its “value” does not exclusively depend on the intrinsic or observables properties.

The works by Jonathan Baldock, Piero Golia, Magali Reus and Claudia Wieser, presented in this exhibition, want to give their opinion within this historical and complex debate by expressing, each one with its own language, the amazing and unexpected power of an everyday object that, thanks to the artist, enters into the “other” dimension of an exhibition space.

Istituto Svizzero di Roma presents the group show La Velocità delle Immagini (The Speed of Images), a reflection on the relationship between speed, modernity and art. The exhibition includes works by artists from different periods, such as the Futurist Giacomo Balla and the artists Sylvain Croci-Torti, Chloé Delarue, Nicolás Fernández, Louisa Gagliardi, Miriam Laura Leonardi, Emanuele Marcuccio, Rammellzee, Manon Wertenbroek and Urban Zellweger.

While recent developments of online information tools seem to have pushed images to maximum speed of circulation on a worldwide level, this exhibition sets out, through a collage effect, to suggest that this perception of flow and acceleration has already offered interstitial zones, for some time, which artists can legitimately occupy. From the early years of the last century, Futurism paid tribute to speed as one of the essential values of the modern age, also suggesting that the physical observation of its effects could provide the stimulus for an aesthetic reversal. Curving lines, breaking up straight lines, fragmenting colors, Giacomo Balla created an iconography of speed, projecting painting into an abstract kinetic space.

But the world of mechanical velocity and the reproducibility of images is also that of the urban explosion, of the exponential increase of dimensions in settlements that become gigantic cities. The least affluent, pushed away from urban centers, find themselves dependent on mass media and public transport, on those objects without origin that the “writers” of the 1980s deploy to take possession of cities and to dream of an identity that can go beyond their present condition. Thus Rammellzee imagines an astral, retro-Futurist and redeeming astral destiny, charged with the unfulfilled promises of modernity. Through a strange effect of chronological condensation, not far from the ecstatic and only slightly morbid modern hope of Balla, and from the whimsical disillusion of Rammellzee, the questions of identity posed by the circulation of knowledge and the explosion of borders and practices become one of the favored spaces of many artists. They are no longer interested in inserting themselves in a tradition, a movement, a field; they simply want to imagine many filters to place over the world. And so if nothing stops the images, artists do not cease to try to even more firmly establish their contours, the colors and reflections left behind by their passage.

Giacomo Balla (1871 - 1958) was a painter, sculptor and set designer, and an outstanding figure of the Futurist movement. Fundamentally self-taught, during the course of his career he explored both abstraction and naturalistic realism. His works are shown in leading Italian and international museums.

Sylvain Croci-Torti (1985) works in Martigny and Lausanne. He studied at ECAL - École cantonal d’art et de design de Lausanne, taking a degree in 2013. He has taken part in many group shows in Switzerland and on an international level.

Chloé Delarue (1986) lives and works in Geneva. She studied at HEAD - Haute école d'art et de design in Geneva, taking a Masters in 2014. She has had many shows in Switzerland, and in 2016 she won the Prix Kiefer Hablitzel and the Prix Hirzel de la Société des Arts, Geneva.

Nicolás Fernández (1968) lives and works in Geneva. He studied at the École supérieure d’art visuel in Geneva. Since 1991 he has taken part in group shows in Switzerland and abroad; he has shown work at the Berlin Biennale.

Louisa Gagliardi (1989) lives and works in Zurich. In 2012 she took a degree at ECAL - École cantonal d’art et de design de Lausanne. She has shown in various spaces in Switzerland and on an international level. In 2014 she won the Swiss Design Awards.

Miriam Laura Leonardi (1985) lives and works in Zurich. She studied at ZHdK Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, taking a Master of Fine Arts in 2015. She explores questions regarding social dynamics through various media, especially writing, audio and performance.

Emanuele Marcuccio (1987) is an Italian artist who lives and works in Lausanne. He uses perforated metal sheets and industrial components in his work. With a degree from ECAL - École cantonal d’art et de design de Lausanne, he has recently shown at Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City, Fondation d’Enterprise Ricard in Paris and Centre D’Art Contemporain in Geneva.

Rammellzee (~1960 - 2010) was a visual artist, rapper and street artist based in New York. As a theorist, he invented the term “Gothic Futurism,” focusing on linguistic themes, an activity that had a profound influence on his work as a writer. He played an active role in the germinal phase of American rap, collaborating with the Beastie Boys, Cypress Hill and many others.

Manon Wertenbroek (1991) lives and works in Paris. She took a degree at ECAL - École cantonal d’art et de design de Lausanne in 2014. Her works have been published in magazines and journals on an international level, and she has taken part in many exhibitions.

Urban Zellweger (1991) lives and works in Zurich. In 2014 he took a degree at ZHDK - Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, and in 2015 at HEAD - Haute école d'art et de design in Geneva. He has taken part in various group shows in Switzerland and on an international level.

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At the time of the opening of The Speed of Images, visitors can see two installations by the Swiss artists Valentin Carron and Sylvie Fleury, which will remain for one years in the spaces of the patio and garden of Villa Maraini, the Roman headquarters of the Swiss Institute.¬¬

Valentin Carron (1977) lives and works in Martigny. In his works he often reproduces Swiss elements, examining them in a critical way. He has recently widened his focus to include themes like power, politics and classification. He has shown work at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013), where he represented Switzerland, and at the Kunsthalle in Bern (2014).

Sylvie Fleury (1961) lives and works in Geneva. She focuses on sculpture and the modeling of different materials, as well as video, neon, installations and wall paintings. In her works she reflects on the position of the artist in the society of consumption, playing with references to art history like Mondrian, Duchamp, Andre and others. Important shows include the retrospective at MAMCO Geneva (2008-09), CAC Malaga (2011), and the exhibition at Villa Stuck in Munich (2016). Her works are on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Centre for Art and Media Karlsruhe, and Museum der Moderne Salzburg.
Part of the Collection des Fonds d'art contemporain de la Ville et du Canton de Genève (FMAC et FCAC).